adapting continuously. In this context, entreprendre is no longer a specialised track; it is becoming a fundamental capability required in every organisational function and across all sectors globally. For several years, Emlyon has chosen to place the entrepreneurial mindset at the heart of its DNA and pedagogy. This culture, inherited from the Lyon silk entrepreneurs who founded the school, has shaped a clear and consistent ambition: to train future leaders who acquire strong scientific and academic foundations, but who also learn through action and become capable of transforming organisations in meaningful and sustainable ways. This philosophy insists that entrepreneurship is not only about launching companies, but also about developing a disposition toward initiative, opportunity recognition, creative problem solving and responsible leadership in any professional setting or organisational context. Such an entrepreneurial mindset cannot thrive without genuine permeability with economic actors and close interaction with real world environments. This is what led Emlyon, as early as 1984, to create the first incubator within a French business school, a pioneering initiative with a long-term impact that is still measurable today: more than 2,800 companies created, 23,000 net jobs generated and an exceptional survival rate above 80 per cent. Beyond these figures, the incubator has helped cultivate a strong and enduring sense of belonging to a network, an increasingly critical dimension of entrepreneurial success in a competitive global economy. When students, alumni, mentors, investors and researchers collaborate within a shared ecosystem, the network itself becomes an engine of opportunity, learning and long-term resilience. Today, incubators have become strategic infrastructures within business schools. They no longer exist solely to launch startups; they also serve as powerful pedagogical laboratories and environments for experiential learning. They facilitate an interdisciplinary approach by exposing students to rapid prototyping, multidisciplinary teamwork, funding challenges, regulatory constraints and immersion in technological environments. This hybridisation, ie the ability to combine business knowledge with design, engineering, data science or environmental expertise, is emerging as one of the most decisive employability factors in today’s economy. Innovation rarely arises from a single discipline; it emerges from their intersection, from productive frictions between perspectives and from the cross pollination of methods and practices across domains. The importance of innovative environments The next step for management schools is therefore to position themselves at the heart of innovation clusters, where technologies, business models and novel uses are actively developed, tested and refined. This is the reason for Emlyon’s move into Station F, the world’s largest startup campus. This
THE MODERN MANDATE
In today’s fluid markets, entrepreneurship is no longer a specialised track: it is a fundamental capability required across all global functions to help professionals adapt, innovate and continuously transform society. Emlyon executive president and dean Isabelle Huault examines the implications for management education
D eep technological, social, environmental and economic disruptions now require management schools to rethink not only their role, but also the ways they embed themselves within the broader ecosystems that are reshaping society. The continuous rise of entrepreneurship and the unprecedented speed at which markets, technologies and citizens’ expectations evolve demands that schools train professionals capable of operating in fluid environments, creating, innovating, transforming and
22 Ambition • ISSUE 3 • 2026
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